In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Harrick Vin, Chief Technology Officer at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), shared his perspective on the evolving role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace.

Vin stressed that AI should be seen as a complement rather than a replacement. “AI will make people do their jobs much better than they do today,” he explained. The technology will increase productivity and allow employees to provide greater value to their customers. In call centers, for example, AI will revolutionize the way agents interact with customers.

By automating tasks like summarizing call logs and analyzing sentiment, AI will give agents greater contextual awareness. This means call center agents will not only respond to inquiries more efficiently, but will also anticipate customer needs and shift the focus from handling complaints to improving overall customer success.

Vin acknowledged that AI is currently used primarily in pre-sale scenarios, but the potential for post-sale interactions is significant. With advances in connected devices, such as smart cars that monitor their own performance, AI could enable companies to anticipate problems before they occur and proactively address customer needs. This transition from traditional call centers to customer success centers will reflect a broader shift in the way companies interact with their customers, he added.

One of the main concerns regarding the impact of AI on employment is the potential for job losses due to increased productivity. Vin addressed this by pointing out that while AI will increase productivity, it will also create new roles and opportunities.

Shifting jobs from complaint management to customer success management will require different skills and effectively redistribute the workforce rather than downsizing it. “The number of people won’t change, but the tasks they perform will fundamentally change,” Vin explained.

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He acknowledged that the rise of AI brings with it a pressing need for continuous upskilling and skills development. The rapid pace of technological advancement means that the relevance of skills is shrinking, with the “half-life” of a skill dropping from 30 years to just 6-7 years. This trend highlights the importance of continuous upskilling and adapting the workforce. Future employees will need to constantly update their skills to remain relevant in an evolving job market, Vin explained.

Looking ahead, Vin sees a future where machines and humans work closely together, each improving the other’s skills. As AI takes over more technical tasks, human roles will shift toward tasks that require critical thinking, creativity, and nuanced judgment. This hybrid workforce will thrive on mutual improvement, with humans refining AI systems and AI enabling humans to perform at their best.

Below you will find excerpts from the interview.

Q: Many people believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will destroy jobs, especially in IT services. Is this true?

Vin: No, I don’t think so. I see AI as a technology that will complement humans rather than replace them.

When I say we are expanding our workforce, I mean that people will be able to do their jobs much better and perhaps faster than they do today. But we will also create a completely different kind of added value for the customers we work for.

To give just one example, think of call centers, for example. AI will not only help call center agents become more productive by saying, for example, “When I spoke to you on the phone, I take the transcript of the conversation, summarize it, and automatically infer the sentiments exchanged during the conversation.” AI will also help call center agents become much more contextual. Who is Harrick? What product has Harrick purchased in the past? Is he a satisfied customer?

Q: Is that the person in the call center who has to do this manually at the moment?

Vin: Yes, today humans do it manually, and actually the information is spread across many data sources within an organization. Some of it is in CRM, some of it is in product information, and so on. How do you bring all of that together and improve my contextual awareness as a call center agent? In the future, AI will enable call center agents to be much more proactive. Can I predict or anticipate when Harrick might need to call and actually reach out to Harrick even before Harrick calls to potentially actually help improve customer satisfaction? So that changes this whole model from almost complaint management to almost value management.

Q: Is this already available? Do you call before the customer has to call?

Vin: To some extent. A lot of it today happens before you’ve sold a product or service. The question is, can we actually do anything after we’ve bought a product or service because the world is changing. There are so many tools. Just think about a car. The car today is a highly connected car that collects so much information about the car, the driving behavior, the wear and tear and so on. So it’s not that hard to imagine a situation where the car itself can say that something is going to go wrong in 30 days. So in some ways it’s kind of a transformation that’s probably going to happen if you think of contact centers not as call centers but almost as customer success centers.

Q: But it takes the same number of employees? For example, if you have 100 employees and you introduce these AI applications, do you need all 100? Do you need 70? Do you need 50? Because productivity increases, as you said.

Vin: Productivity for a certain type of job will increase, which will free them up to do new jobs that they’re not currently doing. For example, from complaint management to customer success management, there will be a whole new set of jobs that they’ll have to do. So as you free up capacity, you’re kind of using that capacity to change the value that customers perceive. So, in my opinion, the number of people won’t change, but the jobs that they’re doing will fundamentally change. And the value that customers attribute to that job will change as well.

Q: And there are no unmanned customer success centers?

Vin: No, I think we’re probably making a big mistake when we think about automation. So personally, I always think about augmentation rather than replacement. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done that isn’t being done today. If you free up the capacity of an existing workforce, they’ll actually start doing things that aren’t being done today.

Q: So there’s a lot of retraining required, right? I mean, new training required across the industry?

Vin: Yes. In some ways, with AI, the role of humans is fundamentally changing from being people who do the work to being kind of trainers and interrogators of intelligent machines, auditors of the work that machines are doing, and people who actually have critical thinking, creativity, and things like that, which means you have to constantly educate people.

As machines become more intelligent, the roles of people will continue to change. And there will be new jobs, as I said, in the area of ​​customer success, not complaint handling. So that will require continuous training and education.

In fact, the usefulness of every skill that people learn today, the so-called half-life of a skill, i.e. the time it takes for an acquired skill to lose half its value, has shrunk from almost 30 years to 6-7 years today, and it continues to shrink. This means that all of our children will actually have to retrain several times over the course of their careers. And so the need to constantly train talent or employees becomes a critical success factor for any company.

Q: But that has already happened, or is the half-life you’re talking about now being accelerated because of AI?

Vin: Yes. It’s accelerating and will probably continue to decline. As technology advances, a lot of hard skills and their half-life will continue to decline. But actually, there will be a lot more need for soft skills, which is the ability to actually understand something, articulate it, explain it coherently and critically analyze it. In software development, for example, the ability to read and analyze code is going to become much more important than writing code in the future because writing code is going to be done by machines. But once the machine has written code, being able to read it is good but not great. And here’s why it’s not great, so let me change that. This actually creates almost a machine-human collaboration situation where machines are constantly complementing and improving on humans. And humans will constantly improve on machines. And that’s kind of a hybrid workforce where humans and machines are constantly improving each other, which will be the norm in the future.

Watch the entire conversation in the accompanying video.